Abstract
This book provides a detailed review of changes that have occurred in agricultural research in developing countries since World War 2, especially since the widespread acceptance of the OECD’s new strategy for Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 1996, which included eight new International Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that needed to be achieved by 2015. The authors demonstrate that meeting (a selection of) these goals radicalized the purpose and character of existing international agricultural development research centres. The book is based on the authors’ reflective experiences from undertaking international research in development with the support of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), collaborating researchers and smallholders in countries worked, and especially from Pakistan and Australia.
The book’s seven chapters follow the changes undertaken by researchers, specifically large research organizations, and references the centres of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) established in 1971 and the ACIAR established in 1982.
The Introduction raises issues that the reader will find repeated in all the subsequent chapters, from disconnects between researchers and intended beneficiaries, to how technical specialists work on their own projects or in disciplinary silos and how technocratic models drive change. The authors conclude that there is a need for collaborative research and a ‘social constructivist, people-centred research culture’ and strategy (p. 86). They call for ‘interpretive social science’ (p. 86) and for social scientists to play a central role in the design and delivery of future research.
Chapter 2 ‘describ[es] the journey towards collaboration in research-based development following World War 2’ (p. 12), where the authors highlight the post-1960 changes that have occurred in ODA to developing countries in agricultural and rural areas. In Chapter 3, the authors discuss how organizations with their roots in agricultural science, like the CGIAR, can incorporate ‘higher-order goals and values’ (p. 40). Here, the reader is introduced to the role of social scientists and social science, and the special case of gender is examined as an important higher-order goal.
Chapters 4–6 provide a detailed historical account of changes in thinking, practice and the organization of agricultural and rural development research approaches over at least four decades, and which are now visible in a wide range of organizations. They follow the shift from using a ‘non-interactive logframe’, requiring project activities, milestones and performance indicators at the outset of research, to systems thinking and people-centred research, all contrasting significantly with critical action research that requires that these elements be organic and without specifying indicators at the outset. Social scientists are presented as essential to achieving collaborative research across various disciplines. The authors note that ‘the social sciences can examine and explain the complex processes involved in human minds and the societies they form…[and] can explore the minutiae of how minds work all the way to how societies function’ (p. 83). In Chapter 7, the reader is presented with the ACIAR model of change, characterized by interdisciplinary processes and an extended period of project development planning using multiple workshops.
Some of us who read this text may be social scientists who began their careers in the early 1960s and experienced similar shifts in research arrangements, especially when working with small-scale farmers. We may interject and insist that these results depend on more detailed and longer-term research approaches as reported by Whitehead (2002) on Northern Ghana. Berry’s (1986) study also reveals a complex social picture from detailed micro studies and the links between micro-level research and macro policy.
As an observer of how gender issues unfold in local programmes focusing on small-scale farmers, I find that the section on the ACIAR’s gender programme outlined in Chapter 3 is small but very important to reference. Incorporating gender equity into the ACIAR research programmes involves two types of strategies—those for implementing gender equity in the aid-recipient country and those focusing on gender equity processes in research programmes and projects. Although the authors argue that ‘one cannot expect the natural scientists to become experts in gender-inclusive strategies, no more than social scientists can become experts in horticulture’ (p. 52), it is important to note that research programmes begin with all researchers first addressing their own positions on social equity and women’s empowerment, along with widely visible levels of patriarchy. Customary social values such as patriarchy are highly contested and universal, but present challenges especially for research organizations with roots in agricultural science. Nevertheless, readers should reflect on the book’s claim that gender equity and women’s empowerment are not necessarily issues for natural andcommodity scientists working with large-scale producers.
Key questions that remain unanswered for me throughout the book have been: what is the perceived role of the technical/agricultural researchers within this new framework? What are their expectations for their research following their changed interactions with local stakeholders, and with other programmes making demands on the time of local officials and local stakeholders more generally? Answering these questions may be important, given the rather grim view of the ‘technical–technocratic’ approach that is presented in this book (Chapter 4). This contrasts strongly with consistently positive references made to the contribution of social scientists, even though, at times, social scientists are positioned as simply enabling work by technical scientists.